Conditions for the resumption of railway transit to Poland became known

The transit restriction was introduced by Ukraine due to the accumulation of wagons and infrastructure problems.

Rail transit to Poland will resume after the tariff component is settled and the problems of the route infrastructure are resolved. This is reported by the railway magazine Railway Supply with reference to Mintans.

As noted, to resolve the issue of restoring transit by rail through Ukraine to Poland, mutual actions of the two countries are needed.

So far, there are two problems: the situational one is the accumulation of wagons, and the systemic one is the outdated infrastructure and tariff policy.

“On a situational issue, from 1,800 to 3,200 wagons accumulated daily on the border with Poland last year, creating traffic jams on the route. After negotiations between the railway workers of the two countries held last year, the situation is temporarily resolved. But after a while, the problem of traffic jams caused by wagons at the border arises again, because there is no systemic solution,” the source said.

The weakest point on the transit route to Poland is the non-electrified section “Kovel – Izov – State Border – Hrubeshev (Republic of Poland)”.

“In this section, Polish railway workers could pass 8-9, and sometimes 7 freight trains daily instead of 10. These volumes were not enough to meet the growing demand for transportation between China and Poland and exports from the country. In addition, the Polish side has built several railway terminals that can receive much more cargo than the infrastructure can handle, the largest of them in the city of Slavki,” UZ said.

To eliminate these bottlenecks in logistics between the countries, UZ has begun and this year will complete the electrification of 94 km of railway tracks on the Kovel – Izov – State Border section.

This will significantly speed up traffic and increase the number of trains. The Polish Railway does not carry out any infrastructure work to modernize the section. So “Grubeszew (Republic of Poland) – State Border” section with a total length of 1.5 km remains non-electrified and is the bottleneck of the route. That is, wagons will again accumulate at the border and time will be spent on changing electric locomotives to diesel locomotives, ”continues a source in the company.

In addition, UZ is awaiting approval from the railway company PKP LHS PKP Linia Hutnicza Szerokotorowa (Poland) to change the fee for the use of wagons owned by the Ukrainian Railways. The accrual is carried out under the terms of the agreement, which was signed back in 2019. At the same time, since September last year, tariffs for the transportation of goods in domestic traffic have been raised twice.

“Since the Polish Railway does not go for a systematic solution to the problem, in order to reduce the idle time of UZ wagons on the territory of Poland, it was decided to introduce a temporary convention to ban railway transit from Ukraine to Poland. Ukrzaliznytsia calls on its Polish colleagues to start modernizing their infrastructure and return to a constructive dialogue, the result of which should be the resumption of transit on financially beneficial terms for both countries,” the company added.

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